Since I last wrote about the afternoon classes I teach, I've managed to acquire a couple of new (and thankfully smarter) students. So now, my schedule's looking quite a bit fuller. Mon-Thurs I leave my house for school at 8am and get back around 3. On Monday afternoons, I've got classes with my 2 original students, Alberto and Marina, from 4:30-6:30. Tuesday afternoons, I've got 3--first with Jose and Lulu's cousin, Salva, from 4:30-6, then with Alberto from 7-8, and the last one with his aunt, Leti, from 8-9. Wednesday afternoons, I've got a class with Yolanda's friend, Toñi, from 5:30-7. And finally on Thursday afternoons from 4:30-6, I have class with Salva again. Classes with my 2 new students, Salva and Toñi are leaps and bounds more enjoyable than the others. Salva is only 14 and he already knows TONS of English. It's so refreshing to have class with someone who actually WANTS to learn English and always tries to explain himself in English, rather than immediately asking me in Spanish how to say something. Since he understands so much and our classes are an hour and a half, I've decided to incorporate some audio-visual aids to our lessons...i.e. MODERN FAMILY! It's a good teaching tool because the episodes are only like 22ish minutes long, the English isn't overly complex, the plot's usually pretty easy to follow, and not to mention the added perk that I am getting paid to spend 20 minutes of my class watching some good, wholesome, American family comedy haha

But anyway, back to the point, with the new students and quite a bit more work, I no longer spend my free time at school playing around on the internet. Instead, I spend it planning lessons. It's a real pain in the ass because none of my students are at the same level so instead of planning like 2 or 3 lessons a week and reusing them, I've gotta prep 7 different lessons every week. Not fun.

So a couple weeks ago, I was teaching Marina and Alberto clothing vocabulary. I figured a story about clothes would be good practice and would be entertaining, so I started searching the internet for a book. After quite a bit of digging, I found the PDF version of a book I remembered from when I was little (pictured below)...

I was pumped not only because the story would teach them both clothing and animal vocabulary, but also because the drawings are awesome and definitely funny for little kids. Marina DIED laughing when she saw this page...

It took her a good 3 minutes to be able to name the articles of clothing that the hen was wearing because she couldn't stop laughing at the egg in his pants hahaha. This book was a great find!

Inspired by Animals Should Definitely Not Wear Clothing, I set out to find some more books that might be good for my lessons. I spent 3 days worth of free time at work looking for books (you'd be surprised how difficult it is to find full text versions of English children's books online) and got extremely distracted when I started finding books that I remembered from my childhood. Here are some of the books (excluding the typical ones, i.e. The Cat in the Hat and the rest of the Dr. Seuss series) that were most memorable to me...

This is the story of a little bird that hatches while his mom isn't in the nest. Since he has no idea what his mother looks like, he wanders all around asking everyone and everything he sees if it's his mother. He asks a kitten, a hen, a dog, and even a giant piece of machinery that he calls a "SNORT." Who could forget the Snort? Haha. I found a few videos of people reading this book on YouTube, so I may have to resort to using those since I can't find the full text anywhere online.

Strega Nona tells the story of an old woman/witch who uses a magic pot to cook pasta. When her servant attempts to use it without permission, he doesn't know the secret to using the pot and he can't make it stop making spaghetti. Thus, the pot overflows and the town gets flooded with spaghetti. The servant's punishment is that he has to EAT the town out of it's mess. HAHAHA awesome, right?

My dad always read this one to Neal, Ben, and I before bed-time. It's about a fox who's trying to steal chickens from a farmer named Festus. Along with his cat, Festus decides that instead of going after the fox with his gun, he's going to scare it away with an elaborate plan including lots of fireworks. This one's got really great illustrations. When I was trying to remember the name of the book, I remembered the pictures vividly and was wishing I could somehow do a google image search using my memories of the book haha. But, after a little help from the brosephs and my padre, I was able to find the title...but unfortunately no full text copy.

 

The Story of Babar tells the story of an elephant who goes to live in the city after his parents die. He lives with an old lady and learns the ways of humans. Later, he goes back to the jungle and becomes king of the elephants. Forever depicted wearing his favorite green suit, Babar teaches his fellow elephants how to live a civilized (western style) life.

 Similar to the story of Babar, Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile tells the story of a city-dwelling, domesticated croc. He lives with a family in their house, goes shopping, takes baths, and much more just like he is a normal human. For some reason, this book always makes me think of sitting under the stairs at Nana's (my grandma's) house and listening to her read to us.

 Speaking of Grandmas, these next few books were all books that my Grandma Mac used to read to Neal, Ben, and me...

"A told B, and B told C, 'I'll meet you at the top of the coconut tree!'

...Chicka Chicka Boom Boom! Will there be enough room?"

I remembered this book when I first started with my afternoon classes and was wondering if the alphabet would be a god place to start. It rhymes, it's a cute little story, and most importantly it teaches not only how to say the names of the letters but also what they look like in upper and lowercase (the lowercase letters are the one's climbing the tree and their parents, that appear at the end, are the uppercase letters). It's a MUST HAVE for teaching the English alphabet!

I have probably had this story read to me like at least 100 times. It was seriously one of my favorites in all of Grandma Mac's collection. Its about a girl who wakes up one day with a giant pair of antlers on her head and has to figure out how to deal with it. I remember it so vividly. She slides down the banister and gets her antlers stuck in the chandelier. She sits in the garden and the birds enjoy being perched on her antlers. They talk about decorating her like a Christmas tree.

 

The story of TYRONE, the T-Rex, who is basically just a big asshole to all the other smaller dinos. He cheats in the sack race by tearing a hole in the bottom of his sack and running. He cheats at dino bowling by stepping OVER THE LINE (Big Lebowski, anyone? haha). When he attempts to cheat at a treasure hunt, he finally gets what was coming to him as he gets stung in the face by a whole hive of bees haha. This is a pretty stupid book looking back on it, but I was definitely a fan when I was little.

 

It took me FOREVER to remember the title of this one. I remembered the story (they're detectives going to Egypt to stop someone from stealing some old artifact) and one of the character's names (Pinkerton) but could not, for the life of me, think of what it was called. After much searching, I finally found it on Amazon. This one was more than likely not a common story, but Neal, Ben, and I must have loved it if I was able to remember the name Pinkerton after probably 15 years of not having heard that story.

The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales had to have been the newest book in our collection of books and Grandma Mac's. If I'm not mistaken, it probably came from one of the book fair's that Trinity, my elementary/middle school, put on pretty regularly. It basically takes old classic tales like the story of "The Gingerbread Man," "Chicken Little," and "The Princess and the Pea," and changes 'em up and makes them a bit sarcastic so that they're funny. Phrases like "The sky is falling! The sky is falling!" and "you can't catch me cause I'm the Stinky Cheese Man!" will forever be stuck in my head.

I couldn't possibly see one of these books without thinking of Grandma Mac. They remind me of the days we used to spend in "the back room" with her. We would sit on the beds that were covered with bright-colored, patchwork, handmade quilts and she would read to us as we ate trail mix (it probably had a special name, but I can't seem to remember what it was if it had one) that was made up of hand-picked and hand-shelled pecans, raisins, chocolate chips (served cold), and Jet-Puffed Mini Marshmallows. Afterwards, we would take turns playing "shooters" and arguing about who would get the good shooter with the black trigger and piece of plastic inside and who would get the crappy one hahahahhaha. SUCH good memories. Man, that was the life. I want to go back to those days when the biggest worry I had was having to choose between reading one of the books above or to watching "Ernest Scared Stupid" for the millionth time haha. I miss all that and I miss them, but all the memories I have like those from these books will always remind me of the good times we spent with them.

On a less sad note, two of my friends from college, Audra and LB are coming to visit me in 5 days! YESSSSSS! This will be the first time in nearly 6 months that I will have seen anyone from home, so I am SUPER pumped! I got next Thursday off from work, so on Wednesday afternoon, I'm heading to Madrid via train to meet them. We're just going to do dinner in Madrid and maybe wander around a bit before we head to the airport again to catch our flight to Malta! I'm going to be running the half-marathon in Malta on Sunday, Feb 27th, so we decided to make a little trip out of it. (By the way this will be my second half--I did my first one here in Almería on Sunday, Jan 30th with a time of 1:58:44...breaking 2 hours was not bad for a first time half-marathoner!) After the race on Sunday, we're going to stay an extra day and then we'll head back to Almería on the March 1st. After that, I've got no idea what we're gonna be doing, but I'm sure it will be an adventure. They're going to be here in Almería with me until the 10th so we'll get to celebrate Audra's birthday (Mar 8th) Spanish-style. As far as living space goes, we're going to be quite limited. Putting our extra full sized mattress on the floor of my room means basically zero space to walk around...and with the whole plastic tubes/piso-is-falling-apart situation, I'm not sure exactly how this is gonna work out for 10 days, but I'll be finding out soon enough! 

Hope y'all enjoy the post and that it brings back memories for all of you too! Lemme know if I left any other important classics off my book list--or if you know where to access them online cuz I'm still stumped!

So to those of you who use my blog to verify that I'm actually alive, I'm sorry if you thought I might have been dead. I've been busy lately, and I'm not gonna lie, I've definitely lost most of the motivation I once had to write in this blog. Not sure what caused that to happen, but I'm gonna try to get motivated again.

Since I promised I would tell this story, I'll finally post this entry that I've been attempting to write for the last like 3 weeks haha. Here begins the story of what happened in our piso over the Christmas holidays. Brace yourself, because it's ridiculous.

Day 1 (Dec 21): Martín has just left this morning and Tomás and Endika had left the day before, i.e. I am alone in the piso. The landlord calls me because the neighbors below us are complaining that there's water leaking from their ceiling. They think our apartment is causing the problem. Landlord comes directly to the apartment to check it out. He and the downstairs neighbor make themselves at home walking all around the piso looking for the problem while I scramble to make the piso look somewhat presentable and to hide our Christmas tree** (see footnote for this hilarious story that I can't believe I've forgotten to post about) that is sitting in a cooking pot, leaned up against one of the walls in the living room. After finding no visible problems, they decide that maybe the piso above us is causing the problem. Since no one seems to be home, they cut off the water in the piso above us as a test.

Days 2 & 3 (Dec 22 & 23): I don't hear anything from the neighbor or the landlord. I assume the problem has been solved.

Day 4 (Dec 24): It's Christmas Eve. I am at home, alone, cooking myself some dinner. As if being home alone on Christmas Eve isn't depressing enough, the downstairs neighbor comes up and decides to rub it in. "Oh, so you're not gonna be going anywhere tonight?," he asks me. "Well would you mind cutting off your water because my ceiling is still leaking and I wanna see if that helps." I politely agree and tell him that I'll turn it off when I'm done cooking.

Day 5 (Dec 25): It's Christmas Day. I'm cooking my enchiladas to take to Kelli and David's so I turn the water back on. It's been turned off for like half a day, so I figure that's enough time for the neighbor to figure out if his test has worked. Also, Tomás comes back today. I explain to him everything that has happened.

Day 6 (Dec 26): No word on the leakage. Once again I assume the problem has been resolved.

Day 7 (Dec 27): The landlord calls again. A plumber (fontanero) and an insurance man (perito--I hear "perrito" and wonder why the plumber is bringing a little dog with him hahaha) are coming by to check out the problem sometime after 5. They show up at about 8:00, go back and forth between our piso and the one below investigating before eventually telling Tomás and I that they need to make a "pequeño agujero" or small hole in the wall in Endika's room. Tomás and I give them the go-ahead and both go back to our rooms. After hearing lots of commotion, I head down the hall to see if I can get a peek at what's going on. At first, much to my surprise this is what I see...

ALL of Endika's stuff is shoved into one corner of his room
...even his bed hahah

However, I see nothing of the hole. When the dudes go downstairs to check something else out, Tomás and I check out the damage...

This "small hole" just happens to be about a foot in diameter.
Slightly larger than what I'd call small

So after some more investigating, they tell us the verdict. Apparently all the pipes in the piso are like 25-30 years old and they ALL have to be replaced. The insurance man tells us they they'll be able to give the landlord, Juan, a whopping 300 euros to help with the cost. After they leave, we call the landlord to break the news to him. He tells us that he's going to come the next day with his "plumber friend" and check out the situation.

Day 8 (Dec 28): Juan shows up with his plumber friend this afternoon. Now let's get some things straight about Juan. He's a terrible landlord. He's super money-hungry...always shows up promptly at the beginning of the month to collect rent. He obviously doesn't care about the maintenance of his properties if he's letting things like this happen. And the worst part, he's super cheap! He doesn't want to spend a dime on anything extra so unless it's something essential, we're not going to get it.

All that being said, you can imagine what this situation with Juan and his plumber friend might have turned out like. I had no idea what they were doing as I chose to stay in my room and out of their way. They were here til about 8pm and before they left, Tomás and I decided to have a look at what they had done. We had heard a good bit of hammering and drilling, and Tomás had seen the kitchen in a complete state of disarray, so we firgured it would be pretty bad. However, upon inspection, it was even worse than what either of us expected.

Instead of REPLACING the old pipes as suggested, Juan had chosen the cheaper route (surprise, surprise!). He had simply cut off the water to the old pipes and run it through new ones. That doesn't sound too bad, right? WRONG. It would be great if it were done correctly, but when you factor in Juan's cheapness and laziness, you've gotta figure there's gonna be a catch. And sure enough, there was. Instead of running the tubes through the walls like a normal person, they decided it would be easier to leave the pipes outside of the wall. Since the pipes obviously can't just hang on the walls by themselves, every few feet they're riveted to the wall with these lovely black plastic fasteners. AND instead of real metal or PVC pipes (I don't know what the norm is, but it's certainly not what we have), we've got clear plastic tubes. That's right. CLEAR. PLASTIC. TUBES.

The tubes start here at the water heater...

Now doesn't that look like some quality workmanship?
The resale value of this place just keeps going up

From there, they go in 2 different directions. One set goes off to the right to the washing machine and bathroom and the other off to the left to the kitchen.

Hot and cold heading behind the washing machine to the bathroom

Through this lovely hole...

...andddd into the bathroom

As if the bathroom wasn't ugly enough before...

Then the pipes run along the bathroom wall...

...to get to the toilet

Tomás is SO ready for his first shower in the newly remodeled bathroom!

Back to the water heater, and now we'll head to the left

Along the wall and behind the stove...

Into the kitchen...

Through Endika's food shelf...poor guy got the worst end of this deal

And finally we arrive at the new faucet for the kitchen sink

Note that there is no option for hot water
Soooo sanitary!

Since all of our pipes are now completely ghetto-rigged, Juan decided he didn't really feel like dealing with the other bathroom. Guess he decided he didn't want to run the tubes all the way from the hot water heater, through Endika's room, my room, and Martín's room to get to the other bathroom, so we now have only 1 functioning bathroom. Before this incident, the shower in our second bathroom already didn't work, so we really only had 1 and a half bathrooms. But now, we're down to 1 as the toilet and sink in bathroom 2 no longer work either. ONE bathroom to be used by FOUR people. Good thing only one of us is a girl or this would be an even bigger problem haha.


Since this incident, several other problems with the piso have surfaced:

• The water heater is currently hanging on the wall by a single screw. The tiles surrounding this one screw have begun falling off the wall and I'm sure the water heater is gonna fall pretty soon here too. We called Juan to let him know and his reassuring words were, "Oh no, don't worry, it's not going to fall." Right, Juan, and I suppose we should wait until it does for you to come fix it?
• The cable box stopped working so we've been out of TV for nearly a month now. However, Juan did have his son bring us a new 24" TV to replace the 10-incher we had before...if only we could use it.
• The electricity is jumpier than ever. It's so bad that you can hardly use 2 things at once. I was trying to dry my hair the other day while I had food in the oven and the electricity was shorting out like every 2 minutes or less. We don't have AC so we've all got little space heaters, and I literally can't even have my computer plugged in and use my space heater at the same time without causing the electricity in the entire apartment to shut off. 

Here's a few different opinions on the current state of the piso:

• Martín's favorite phrase to describe it is, "que piso más tercermundista!!" That means that basically, our apartment looks like something straight out of a third world country hahaha. Sadly, it's true.
• My friend Juanmi said it looked like a level of Super Mario Bros with all the plastic tubes on the walls.
• Kelli just saw the apartment for the first time and described it as the epitome of a Spanish apartment...dark, cramped, and hideously decorated, complete with "castle-locks" on the doors hahahah. Needless to say, she appreciated her apartment just a little bit more after seeing mine

Even though we've all agreed that it's ridiculous that we're living in this crappy of an apartment, none of us really want to pack up all of our stuff and move. Endika and Martín have both tried talking to the landlord about it. He basically told us we've got 2 options: if we don't like the price we're paying, then we can move out OR he can get everything fixed, which would mean at least a month (probably more knowing the way Spaniards work) of workers in the apartment everyday, tearing up walls, floors, tubes, etc. Since we're only gonna be here til June, that doesn't really seem like it's worth it to any of us. So for now, we're just dealing with it. Oh well. What can ya do? Just another typical Spain adventure.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

**CHRISTMAS TREE STORY--As you might remember from earlier posts, Tomás likes to steal things. You might also recall the video that I posted of him stealing a tree from the street one night in hopes of using it as a Christmas tree since he had never had one before. Since his birthday was December 15th, I decided that it would be awesome to get him a Christmas tree--but not just any old Christmas tree. I figured, what better than to combine his desire for a tree with his love for stolen things. That's right my friends...a stolen Christmas tree!

So, Endika and I went out on the night of the 14th to "buy some candy" that we were both craving. We drove around the city in Endika's car looking for a tree. When we pulled up outside of the soccer stadium, we found some little mini pine trees. They were perfect! Endika proceeded to chop one down using a meat cleaver and his feet to stomp on the trunk to break it.

Like so...

GREAT SUCCESS! Note the meat cleaver in his left hand hah

We hastily shoved the tree into the car (in hopes that no one that was driving by was a cop), brought it back to the piso, decorated it with a box of decorations I had bought earlier that day, and we brought it inside shortly after midnight on the 15th. When Tomás saw it, his eyes lit up like a little kid!

Árbolico de navidad! Calidad exagerao!

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Sorry if this post is poorly written...I wrote it over a period of at least 3 weeks (like 2 or 3 paragraphs at a time) and I'm too lazy to go back and proofread it right now. You'll have to deal with it. At least I finally posted something after a month of not writing!

I need to fill y'all in on everything that I've been up to lately and share some exciting news, so more updates will be coming soon! For now, I'm off to bed! Goooooooodnight my friends :) Miss y'all!